Potential I/O Bottleneck Fix for the Transformer Prime

For those who are unaware, a bottleneck is when a device’s performance is affected by a single weak link. This can be found on electronic devices across the spectrum from tablets to phones to computers, and so on. An example of a bottleneck would be like building a computer with a quad core processor, dual high-end video cards, installing 64-bit Windows 7, then only putting in 128 MB of RAM. The entire system is awesome, but because there’s no RAM, it’ll lag and crash frequently. Bottlenecks can happen in Android as well, as many ASUS Transformer Prime users are well aware. While there may be no helping the guy who puts 128 MB of RAM into a modern computer, ASUS Transformer Prime users may actually have a fix for their bottlenecking woes.

XDA Forum Member TweakerL, after some experimentation and help from a number of others, came to the conclusion that the reason for the bottlenecking may not be only software related. As TweakerL explains:

So, the whole idea here started with me reading an article on how part of the whole I/O problem with the transformer is partially caused by the hardware used as internal storage. I wanted to find out if this had any merit and I figured the best way to do it would be to “replace” the internal storage. I did this by mounting the /data partition to the exteral SD (which according to my research, my specific SD Card is better at writing speeds – allegedly the main problem with the transformer’s internal storage hardware wise). Then I ran a bunch of benchmarks and have been running it that way for about 24 hours and so far it feels great. Anyone is welcome to give it a try, and hopefully with help, suggestions and feedback from the community, we can all take as much advantage of this idea as possible.

In essence, the issues with the Transformer Prime is that when the device is writing data to its internal storage, the very slow write speeds bottleneck the system causing serious lagging problems. The answer is moving the /data partition to an external SD card with better write speeds. Of course, this is only the beginning.

The next steps in development involve also moving the /cache partition to increase performance even more and testing to see what effects this will have on every day activities like Nandroid backups. Additionally, TweakerL gives kernel devs instructions on how to implement the fix on their kernels should they want to. Want more? Okay, TweakerL has also provided a short, easy to follow guide to cloning the data on the internal storage to the external storage so when you flip flop the two, you don’t lose any data. Apparently, the only thing this thread doesn’t do is print money.

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